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Victor’s sin wasn’t in being too ambi­tious, not nec­es­sar­i­ly in play­ing God. It was in fail­ing to care for the being he cre­at­ed, fail­ing to take respon­si­bil­i­ty and to pro­vide the crea­ture what it need­ed to thrive, to reach its poten­tial, to be a pos­i­tive devel­op­ment for soci­ety instead of a dis­as­ter.

We’ve already been through sev­er­al sit­u­a­tions where new tech­nolo­gies come along. The Industrial Revolution removed a large num­ber of jobs that had been done by hand, replaced them with machines. But the machines had to be built, the machines had to be oper­at­ed, the machines had to be main­tained. And the same is true in this online envi­ron­ment.

I have a few exam­ples of things that are start­ing to hap­pen. And you can see that AI nor­mal­ly stands for arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, but I’ve often con­clud­ed it stands for ​“arti­fi­cial idiot.” And the rea­son is very sim­ple. It turns out that these sys­tems are good, but they’re good in kind of nar­row ways.